


On the Unusual Nature of Dutch Elm Disease in Grosse Pointe, Michigan: A Case Study

by ghosthorse_tracks



Category: The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-06 01:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5396954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthorse_tracks/pseuds/ghosthorse_tracks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Therese fails to swallow enough sleeping pills and instead grows up to be Dr. Therese Lisbon, botanist. She returns to her hometown intending to study Dutch Elm Disease, but finds something much more complex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Unusual Nature of Dutch Elm Disease in Grosse Pointe, Michigan: A Case Study

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tekuates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tekuates/gifts).



On the Unusual Nature of Dutch Elm Disease in Grosse Pointe, Michigan: A Case Study

`The objective of this study is to document the spread of Dutch Elm Disease (DED) in Grosse Pointe, Michigan over the course of thirteen years, between 1974 and 1987. Although it is a case study involving only one town, the researcher hopes to discover patterns that will assist other towns in slowing the spread of DED.`

DED, Therese thought. The acronym made her laugh dryly as she lifted her slender fingers from the keys of her typewriter. It looked an awful lot like _dead_ , if you were reading too fast.

She could be dead right now. Lux might argue that she should be dead right now, that she had ruined their whole performance with her stubborn survival. Since then, she had learned that sleeping pills were one of the least effective methods of suicide.

(Sometimes, she wished her milquetoast father had had the balls to keep a gun in the house.)

Dr. Therese Lisbon was thirty years old, an adjunct professor of botany, unmarried and uninterested. She had an apartment, but she spent most of her time in the faculty office she shared with another adjunct, a pudgy, bespectacled man whose name escaped her. It was one in the morning and she was typing. Her practiced fingers made no errors.

`This case study will involve unconventional research methods. In the absence of more official data, the numbers of remaining elm trees in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in 1974 come from the counts done by the researcher as a high school student. She justifies the use of this data both in the absence of more official data and due to the unusual detail put into the preliminary research as a high school student. (See Figure 1 below for an example of this unusual detail in the form of a meticulously marked map.)`

Therese was afraid to photocopy the map: it was tattered, fraying at the edges and tearing at the folds. On the yellowed paper, she could see where she marked, in colored pencil, uninfected elms, infected elms, and stumps where infected elms had once been. Each colored dot had a number that linked to a corresponding sheet with painstaking detail on each tree's condition.

Making the map had often been her only excuse to leave the house, especially after the homecoming incident. Her father had always supported her scientific interests (as if she were the son he had always wanted); it was her mother who needed convincing. The convincing got easier when her pursuits began to look pathetically innocent compared to Lux's late-night liaisons.

Memories of those rare days of freedom filled her head as she gently placed the map in the photocopier. A thought slipped into her mind, stealthily, before she could realize what it was – if her data was destroyed, there was no reason to go back. If the map survived, perhaps it was fate.

(And fate it was.)

It was five in the morning and Therese was on a plane to Michigan. Lux would have liked this, she thought, flying. She would have liked the mixture of power and helplessness that came with it: sailing high above the earth, yet having no control over what happened next.

`Day 1  
I have arranged to stay with an old friend, Chase, while I conduct my research. He and his family have kindly invited me into their home and have also allowed me to study their elm tree in detail.`

The word "friend" lingered in Therese's mind awhile before her fingers put it to paper. The man at the head of the table looked nothing like the gawky adolescent who watched her and her sisters through windows. He looked respectable, a family man, any voyeuristic tendencies long gone.

"Thanks for joining us for breakfast, Dr. Lisbon. We're so happy to have you." Chase's wife sat at the end of the table. She smiled with glass eyes and porcelain teeth.

The table seemed impossibly long and wide, a vast expanse of polished oak, gratuitous for a family of four. Down at the other end sat Chase, quiet and mild. “You're welcome to join us again anytime, Therese.”

The children, two girls, blonde and blue-eyed like their mother, sat side by side near their mother's end of the table. They were perfect, silent dolls.

"I'll send you a copy of the article when it's finished," Therese said.

`Day 2  
Chase and his wife have agreed to let me take cuttings from the infected branches of their elm. My analysis of these cuttings (see the photographs in Figure 2 below) shows the hallmarks of DED, notably dark streaks in the sapwood of infected branches. This tree however, does have some unusual traits: based on the low positioning of some of the infected branches on the tree, I can conclude that the disease has nearly completed its infestation of the tree. Under normal circumstances, this tree should not be alive.`

"Lunch is ready," Chase's wife called from the kitchen. 

Therese already sat at the dining room table, analyzing the branches she'd cut and scrawling notes. She hardly had time to look up before a plate with a ham sandwich was set down in front of her. The slices of lunch meat lay in even folds between the slices of bread, held together by a toothpick stuck dead center. "Thank you so much, Mrs. Buell. It looks lovely."

Chase's wife took plates from a silver platter and set them down at each place at the table: one for herself, one for her husband, one for each daughter. "We value our guests very greatly in this house."

"We most certainly do. Especially you, Therese. You're doing such a wonderful thing for our community." Chase entered the room and sat beside Therese at the table.

Therese nearly choked on a laugh. "Oh, it's not much, just a bit of compare and contrast. If I don't publish anything, I'll lose my job – or maybe I won't lose my job, but I won't get promoted. I needed something to study."

"Compare and contrast?" Chase's wife cocked an eyebrow. "Does that mean – does that mean you're not going to do anything for our tree?"

"N-not for yours specifically, ma'am. But I hope my research will help other trees."

Chase's wife gritted her teeth, hardened her eyes, looked at her husband. "You shouldn't have let this woman into our house. I thought she was going to help us. I was mistaken." She stormed out of the room, dragging her daughters along by their wrists.

`Day 3  
I've been out all day, driving around town to look at the trees. Most places, there's nothing left but a stump; sometimes, there's even a new tree, an oak or a maple, growing in its place. I received permission from three homeowners to take cuttings from their elms. Five homeowners slammed the door in my face. This was expected and shall be duly noted in my article.`

Therese sat at the dining room table, typing away. It wasn't her office, but in her two-in-the-morning haze, the location made little difference. She dismissed the sound of timid footsteps on the stairs as a hallucination. They kept coming, though, pausing on occasion to avoid a creaky floorboard. Then came the whisper, "Therese, it's me."

It could still be a hallucination, she thought. She'd had nightmares more vivid than this, after the suicides – she saw her sisters' stone-cold corpses wandering the house, gasping for breath, with piercing, wide-eyed thousand-yard stares. They couldn't speak, try as they might, only gasping rhythmically. She knew what they meant to say: "Help. Help me."

"Therese, I'm going crazy. I need you."

She turned her head ninety degrees. She saw a pallid man dressed in pajamas. The veins protruded from his wiry arms like the streaked sapwood of an infected elm. If doctors treated people like botanists treated trees, this man would have been euthanized long ago so he couldn't infect anyone else with his misery.

(She needed to peel away the bark to make her diagnosis official.)

Her hands stroked his trembling arms, made their way up to his shoulders and down to his waist. She kissed his blubbering, weeping mouth, tried to find something that was alive.

_"The secret is to be mysterious," Lux told her one afternoon. "Never let a man have all of you. Once they find out everything, you're not interesting anymore. He'll go find someone else to figure out."_

_"But you need to know all of someone to love them."_

_"I don't want men to love me. Love is boring. I want them to be obsessed with me."_

Therese kissed as clumsily as she walked – she hadn't kissed anyone voluntarily since undergrad, and even then, it was only the result of too much drinking and too little sleep. She remembered the time the grimy adjunct stayed all night in the office, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for something. He waited for Therese to rise from her chair for a new ream of paper, only to put his chubby hands on her waist and suck at her mouth in a way that barely resembled a kiss. Chase didn't seem to mind or even notice her ineptitude. She foraged with her tongue, wondering why his mouth was so cold. It dawned on her slowly, that everything here was cold, even in June: she wore her thickest wool sweaters and gloves and still she shivered, all day and all night.

"You're so warm. Come to bed." Chase only broke the kiss enough to breathe the icy words into her mouth.

"I can't. Your wife, your kids – "

"My wife won't mind. She's cold too."

Therese flashed back to her nightmares, saw Bonnie with her skinny arms crossed over her chest – not a girl anymore, but a trembling corpse with rope-marks on her neck. She read the gasps on Bonnie's lips: "Cold, cold."

"I should really get back to writing. I have a lot of work to do." She shoved him away. Even his pajamas were cold to the touch: she could hardly imagine what her lips must look like after they had locked with his. Blue-tinted, like they were when she stayed in the swimming pool too long as a child.

Chase's eyes widened and rolled up toward the ceiling; he gasped and groaned, clawing for breath with his tongue. "I told you I needed you. We all need you so badly, so badly!"

Therese packed up her typewriter with shaky hands. In a nightmare, the man would have attacked her with his deathly pale hands and freezing cold mouth; she never would have escaped.

Here, she somehow scrambled out the door in time.

Therese had learned not to question how she managed to cheat death not once but twice, but as she typed her final article for submission, she thought about the first time.

_One handful should be enough, Therese thought as she poured her mother's sleeping pills into the palm of her hand. Her three sisters watched with reverence as she swallowed the pills in one fluid gulp, chased with a glass of ginger ale, her choice for her final earthly pleasure._

Looking back, she couldn't believe how unscientific she had been about a matter so serious as her own life and death. She must have looked dead to the four naïve boys who fell into their trap, but she was just starting to regain consciousness – it was like sleep paralysis, only it lasted for hours, maybe days. She saw everything, from the scared boys, to her sisters' deaths, to Lux's final, brilliant seduction.

She saw everything yet had no power to change it. She'd seen the movie a million times, but no matter how loudly she cried, no one on the screen heard. They were forever cold – even giving up all her warmth would never change that.

Safe in her office, dimly lit by a single bulb, Therese typed.

`Conclusion  
After several days of observation and comparison in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the researcher concludes that she cannot generalize these results to any other populations due to the strange features of Grosse Pointe's strain of Dutch Elm Disease. The researcher strongly suspects that this is a case like no other and should therefore be disregarded.`


End file.
